1 Lap Of The Island

Amid the coronavirus pandemic Hugh Roberts set out to ride around the whole of the UK mainland and recounts to James Shrubsall how he got on

- James Shrubsall

Cold beer and sun loungers are likely to rank quite a lot higher than howling gales and days of incessant rain in the memories of many Brits during a locked down summer that broke records for good weather left, right and centre.

But spare a thought for Hugh Roberts, owner and founder of Tour of Britain organiser Sweetspot and his old friend Robin Young – who set out to cycle the entire coast of Britain on Sweetspot’s Great Tour charity ride, and returned with tales of lashing rain, battering winds, and unused sun cream. And that’s before we get to the broken bones.

Departing from the Isle of Wight at the beginning of July after months of great weather down south, Roberts and Young could reasonably be optimistic about the weather. Sweetspot hopes the event will become a fixture of the charity calendar with a mystique akin to the London Marathon but any ride of 63 days and 6,600km in the UK is likely to see varied conditions and even an ‘incident’ or two – which is exactly how it panned out.

In the end it was the all-too predictable north-south divide that interceded weather-wise, as Young explains.

“I wore sun cream until we got to Norfolk,” he says. “After that I did not again wear sunscreen until one day in Scotland, coming down the west coast when it actually got warm for a day. And I wore it again in North-West England. So I wore sun cream once in nearly five weeks.”

And there were days that stand out in the memory for being as rewarding as they were challenging. Describing the 86-kilometre day from Tongue to Scourie along Scotland’s northern coast into a raging headwind, Young says: “We did eight kilometres in the first hour that day. You could barely make any progress. And you go, ‘When is this ever gonna end?’